A Street Divided (19 page)

“This is why if we look today it is difficult to find Israelis who collaborate with Palestinians,” he wrote. “However there are many cases of Jews who collaborated with the Nazis, because at the time, the Jews were also in a position of similar weakness.”

Jawad's piece was part of a one-day conference held in 2001 to discuss what participants saw as the insidious role of collaborators in undermining the Palestinian uprising.

“The Palestinian collaborator is an expression of Israel's larger ‘de
fense' policies,” he wrote in his presentation. “Israel is one of those preeminent countries, whose interest in acquiring information has historically acted as a main part of its military power and as a means of control. Collaborators are a part of this process of information gathering alongside the satellites, sensitive listening equipment, wiretapping, unmanned drones, not to mention access to data from schools, banks and other bureaucratic paper trails.

“The Palestinian collaborator in the Israeli strategy also serves the purpose of creating mistrust, spreading confusion and undermining collective self-confidence within Palestinian society.”
5

Ameel.

“They Slaughtered Us”

More than once, Abu Fadi's home was hit by Molotov cocktails. Abu Fadi enclosed the front of his house in iron shutters that made it look like a movie-sized armored tank. But the attacks still kept coming.

Some nights the family would be awoken by the sound of shattered glass and stones slamming into their roof, a reminder of the hatred and hostility right outside their door.

Some mornings they would come out to find new graffiti scrawled on the stone walls of Assael Street:
Beware of the collaborator: Abu Fadi.

Perhaps the biggest confrontation on the street took place when Abu Fadi's family got into a feud with one of the neighbors over borrowed holiday lights.

Abu Fadi had loaned strings of lights to the Mujahed family a few doors down so they could hang them for a wedding. It was a common courtesy on a street where someone always seemed to be hosting a celebration of a wedding, birthday or religious holiday. This time, the lights didn't come back right away. After a month of waiting, one of Abu Fadi's sons went by to find out where they were. Ramadan was coming up and his family wanted the lights back to decorate their home. The young Mujahed searched his house and found a bag of lights. But they weren't the right ones.

The two young men started arguing. Their voices rose as they threw insults at each other. The younger Mujahed said something about Imm Fadi, an affront about his neighbor's mom that he probably knew might trigger a neighborhood brawl. And it did. Curses gave way to pushes, pushes turned into punches. Then came the bats and stones. Blood spattered the stone stairs and iron gates as the brawl spilled out onto the cobblestone street. The families issued calls for help—for reinforcements. Dozens of friends and relatives rushed to Assael to join the fight. Abu Fadi waved his gun around as assailants forced their way into his house and rampaged through the rooms.

“They slaughtered us,” Imm Fadi said.

Stones smashed into metal gates and car windows. The shouts, screams, curses and accusations woke the neighborhood. Israeli soldiers and police eventually turned up and people scattered. They brought out their dogs to search Abu Fadi's home for weapons. Abu Fadi and his sons were hauled off to jail, along with some of the neighbors.

“It was terrible,” said Sara Arnold, who was at her home on the western side of Assael as the feud cascaded down the street. “I heard shots. I didn't know if it was firecrackers or not.”

Sara, a prim, short-haired blond with glasses that accented her schoolteacher demeanor, counted herself one of Israel's liberals. She backed the idea of a Palestinian state and worked with young Palestinian students in poor Jerusalem neighborhoods like Beit Hanina. She opposed Israeli settlements in the West Bank and didn't think much of Netanyahu. She'd moved to a small place on Assael Street in the late 1990s when things with Israelis and Palestinians seemed to be heading in the right direction. Netanyahu and Arafat signed peace deals—and violence appeared to be on the wane.

There was a sense that Israelis and Palestinians might not have to live their lives in perpetual conflict. Maybe. Sara and other Jewish residents of Abu Tor would walk down a few blocks to buy things from the Palestinian shops where boys from Assael would hang out.

After the street fight, Sara ran into a couple of them at the store. She wasn't sure which families they came from, but her teacher instincts kicked in.

“You don't know what you're doing to your little brothers and sisters,”
she told them.
“You don't know what you're doing to all the little kids on the road. I saw them running into their houses. They're going to have nightmares for years about that.”

The boys laughed at Sara and blew her off. That only fueled her frustrations. To her, Assael was an ideal place to live. The street brawls made her think twice.

“Stupid,” she said of the brawl. “That is a terrible part of their culture.”

Sara wasn't willing to accept that kind of violence as a normal part of neighborhood living.

“It shocked me,” she said. “I worked in Bethlehem and Beit Hanina and I hadn't seen that kind of violence. That was just really a childish kind of violence.”

It didn't matter much what people like Sara thought. Abu Fadi and his sons weren't afraid to settle a problem with a street fight. The neighbors would get into confrontations over the smallest of things. One American couple living on the street took to calling them the “Friday Night Fights.” One of the biggest triggers was parking—something that was always in short supply on the street.

Because it had once been little more than a ridgeline trail, Assael was so narrow that it was impossible for cars to park on both sides without blocking the street. Most of the families on the western side of Assael had off-street parking garages. And street parking on the west side of Assael was banned. The best place to park was at the end of the cul-de-sac, where about a dozen cars could park in a line under a 15-foot-tall pink stone wall on the western side of the street, below the Goeli home where the UN had prevented the Great Toilet Fight of 1966 from becoming the trigger for a bigger problem. But the lot was often full, especially at night when everyone was home.

Everyone on the eastern side of the street jealously guarded the parking spots outside their homes. Families hung hand-painted “No Parking” signs from their fences and rushed out to shout at people who ignored the warnings. As surveillance technology evolved and the prices for high-tech equipment dropped, families on Assael installed cameras outside their houses. One after the other, the residents of Assael Street set up security cameras with the lenses trained on their parking spaces and front doors. Some families ran the live feed on their television sets while they did other things around the house. So it's no surprise that one of the biggest battles on the street between Abu Fadi and his neighbors started as a fight over parking.

One afternoon in 2009, one of the Mujahed boys parked outside Abu Fadi's home. One of Abu Fadi's sons came out to tell him to move it—and things quickly got out of hand. The bad blood between the two families had thickened. Neither guy was willing to back down. Abed Mujahed came out to defend his son. Abu Fadi came out to protect his boy. Abed said he was thrown down his front steps by Abu Fadi when his neighbor stormed into their house. Abu Fadi's sons said they were pelted with stones and left with bloody gashes on their faces. Israeli police arrived and hauled men from both families off to jail.

When tempers cooled, members of a neighborhood reconciliation committee, a sulha, tried to mediate. They heard from both families and decided that Abed was in the wrong. They told Abed to pay Abu Fadi $2,500. For Abed, it was the final indignity. He stopped talking to Abu Fadi's family altogether.

Sins of the Fathers and Their Sons

Though most of the people on Assael Street only knew Abu Fadi by reputation, there was one man who knew his history intimately: Hijazi Bazlamit, the grandson of the man shot dead on the Abu Tor hillside in 1951. The younger Hijazi and Abu Fadi shared a common history in more ways than one. Their past went back much further than this street. Back to the days when they were both young men, about the same age, trying to figure out how to adjust to life under Israeli rule.

Like Abu Fadi, Hijazi had cast his fortunes with Israel as a young man. More than anyone else on the street, because of his work as an Israeli policeman, Hijazi knew what it felt like to be called a collaborator. But the two had met even earlier. Hijazi had hired Abu Fadi to work with him at a small vegetable market. The partnership soured when Hijazi accused Abu Fadi of stealing from him. That set the tone for the two men's tangled, lifelong relationship. Although Hijazi had spent years enforcing Israeli laws, he had no sympathy for what he considered to be Abu Fadi's betrayal.

“It is well known that the Israeli occupation seeks to find people who are vulnerable, and he was the perfect case,” Hijazi said.

Hijazi traced Abu Fadi's corrosive life to his childhood, from a sober young boy who was beaten by his father to a young man who fled an abusive home and found a new beginning working for Israel.

“They started giving him money,” he said of the Israeli government. “They started asking for information. They found out that he had the perfect appetite for that kind of work.”

The two didn't cross paths again until the late 1980s, when Hijazi started moonlighting as a part-time security guard for the editor of a small East Jerusalem newspaper.

“My first day on the job, they came to me and said: ‘We'd like to introduce you to the head of security,'” he said. “I was shocked to see [Abu Fadi], because I knew he wasn't a clean man.”

The two men didn't talk about their past as they worked out security for the editor. When the newspaperman had to get around town, Hijazi would drive in the front of the convoy and Abu Fadi would provide security in the back.

After a few weeks on the job, Hijazi said Abu Fadi came to him with a proposal. Abu Fadi was worried that the editor would get rid of his security, so he came up with a plan to stage an attack on his convoy. Hijazi wanted no part of it. He told the editor of the plan, but his boss wanted proof. When the day of the planned ambush arrived, Hijazi said he thwarted the attack by leading the convoy down another route. He was fired by Abu Fadi that day. But that wasn't the end of the incident. Not long after he was fired, Hijazi said he was heading home from work when a car pulled up alongside him and opened fire. The shots missed, and Hijazi sped off after his attacker. He knew who it was before the cars pulled up outside Abu Fadi's home.

“I chased him, I hit him, and I hit him some more,” Hijazi said. “His wife and children were begging me to stop.”

Hijazi said he left Abu Fadi bruised and beaten in his home. Hijazi thought that might be the end of it—until Abu Fadi moved to Assael Street a few years later.

“I couldn't believe it,” Hijazi said. “How has he moved into this house? On my street?”

Their history clouded their families' relations. And it soon carried over into their sons' relationships as well.

“He found an excellent opportunity to take revenge,” Hijazi said.

The hostility between the two men constantly simmered. Abu Fadi accused Hijazi's young sons of spray-painting the threatening “beware of the collaborator” graffiti on Assael Street.

“If you think my sons did it, then take it to the police,”
Hijazi defiantly told Abu Fadi.

Things came to a head one day in 2010 when Hijazi's son, Ahmad, confronted Abu Fadi's oldest son about an unpaid debt. The argument quickly got physical and Ahmad took a swing at Fadi. The two families agreed to take part in a neighborhood sulha, but it did almost nothing to defuse the situation. To the Bazlamits, it was a neighborhood fight over money. To Abu Fadi, it was a politically motivated attack. Israeli prosecutors accused Ahmad of plotting to kill a collaborator, Hijazi said.

“They made it into a political issue, but my son didn't intend to escalate things,” Hijazi said.

Disputes kept breaking out and the two families wound up on opposite sides of a courtroom more than once. One time, the Bazlamits asked an Israeli judge to kick Abu Fadi off Assael Street. They accused Abu Fadi and his sons of spreading rumors and lies about the Bazlamits.

“Please, Your Honor,”
Hijazi asked the judge. “
For the sake of our family, for the sake of our neighborhood, please remove them from the area. We aren't the ones creating the problem. They are.”

The courts tried to keep the two families apart by telling them to steer clear of each other on the street, Hijazi said. But Assael was so small that it was impossible to do. Abu Fadi and his family couldn't drive to their home on the dead-end street without going past the Bazlamits.

When Abu Fadi died of cancer in 2011, Hijazi thought that might be the end of it.

“None of us went to the mourning when he died,” said Hijazi, who saw Abu Fadi as a traitor to his people, someone unworthy of a Muslim burial. “We're not supposed to drink with him. We're not supposed to eat with him. He harmed his people, so we refused to have anything to do with his farewell.”

Hijazi wasn't the only one who was silently grateful that Abu Fadi was gone. Abed Mujahed was also thankful to be rid of a man who had been the source of so many problems for him and his family.

“When he died, the neighbors came and said: ‘Let's offer some condolences,'” Abed said. “I refused.”

Abu Fadi's wife and kids tried to repair some of the rifts with their neighbors on the street. But the underlying hostility continued to resurface.